Why do the fonts in Firefox Linux look so terrible?

Dave, Why is it that, “out of the box”, the Firefox browser looks great (font wise) when run on a Windows OS but looks terrible (almost too small and unreadable) on any Linux OS I have tried it on. It is probably the number one killer reason for me not switching to Linux.

At a standard screen resolution of 72 dots per inch, any small typeface is going to look pretty mediocre, and I know what you mean about Linux defaulting to a really high resolution for a given screen, which produces tiny type.

However, it turns out that it’s pretty easy to change your desktop to have larger typefaces, or even to tweak Firefox to look better. The easiest way to have larger type across your entire Linux experience is to simply pick a smaller screen resolution. If you’re at 1280×1024, for example, change it to 1024×768 and watch how everything gets a bit bigger and easier to read. Depending on your desktop and window manager, you might also be able to pick a different theme that has larger fonts too.

Within Firefox itself, you can change Firefox font settings from the Edit -> Preferences menu item (pick General, and click on “Fonts & Colors”). Pick a larger font, reload the page, and see how it looks. Of ocurse, you can also just use the key combination Ctrl-+ (the Control key and the + symbol at the same time) to make all the type on a Web page larger. I use that extensively when I browse the Web too, actually.

Hopefully those tips will help you out and let you give Linux another shot. I did ask a couple of Linux wizards, Dee-Ann LeBlanc and Ray Lischner, about this problem and they reported excellent results with Firefox on Suse Linux, Fedora and RHEL.

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I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by
buying you a cup of coffee!

No offense but this is seriously a terrible answer. Yes, Linux fonts often do look bad on the web out of the box. The reason is because most web sites are designed for Windows fonts, which often aren’t included in Linux distros so Firefox ends up trying to substitute a font which really isn’t the correct one. First, you need to install the “mscorefonts” package (should be called something similar on your distribution, search for “ms core fonts (your distro)” which will give you the standard fonts used on the internet. That alone should make a huge difference; you may be able to tweak the fonts still further by turning off antialiasing for small font sizes, some distributions and OS X have this on by default; whereas Windows does not. Your distribution may have a GUI tool for this but the most reliable way is to edit the config files under /etc/fonts/ and add a rule for it. Look up a tutorial on fontconfig and you can find out how to do it. Yes it takes a bit of fiddling to set up the first time but once you get it set up Linux Firefox can look just like it does on Windows. Then you can just cut and paste your configuration to each new computer you use.

Sorry but this solution is not helpful. I don’t want to come across rude but if you don’t know much about a topic you should refrain from giving advice that is more damaging then helpful. Shrinking the resolution on a LCD, really? Modern monitors look really ugly at all but their native resolutions (except maybe at exactly even divisors like running a 1600×1200 at 800×600 but who would want to do that…).
The problem is not only font size (and dpi setting), but also the type of the fonts and the rendering method (clear type, aliased, greyscale) and the rendering mode.

Dave is wrong.
Right-click on the Windows desktop, and go down to “Properties”. Click on that.
In the box that then pops up, select the top tab that says “Appearances”. Then, in the lower right-hand corner, click on “Effects”.
Then, in the next box that pops up, click on the second bar from the top, and choose the “clear text” option.
This really does solve your problem.

There are a lot of places like this one where people suggested to play with DPI or monitor displaysize, ashttp://linux-blog.org/kde-and-xorg-fonts-and-dpi/
As I use icewm instead of kde or gnome, this problem affects me and it was a mess to find the correct solution.
Finally I found that it is a better idea to increase (or change) fonts for gtk apps, as sugested here:http://faqs.pcbsd.org/index.php?action=artikel&cat=9&id=281&artlang=en
Note that this is a fix for iceweasel, firefox, icedove, thunderbird
and others (Taken from the web page):
How do I change the default font of Gtk applications?
If you want to change the font of Gtk applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird or Real Player, you can do the following using the terminal creating a Gtk configuration file: Launch you favorite text editor (Kate, KWrite, KEdit, etc…) and add the following line to the file:
gtk-font-name=”sans-serif 12″
You can change sans-serif to something else such as Tahoma, etc… But sans-serif is the default KDE font, so it may look more consistent with sans-serif. And you can change 12 to another font size too. Save your file as .gtkrc-2.0 in your home direcory (ie: /home/john). Then restart your Gtk application, and the application font (File – Edit – View – Tools…) should look to your liking

I’m sorry but this is article is not very helpful. Lowering the screen resolution will impact all applications and the entire environment. Why would I want to run at a lower resolution just because my firefox fonts look too tiny?
Even if you do go in to the font settings and bump up those sizes, the fonts look too big and most sites end up hard to read or just plain garbled.
The same goes for CTRL and +/_. That messes up the image rendering too because of FF’s zooming feature.
One solution I’ve found through trial and error is to change the fonts, but in a counter-intuitive kind of way. Under preferences>content>advanced, change the default serif font to 18 and keep the minimum font size at 14 or 12. This will increase most fonts, not garble any of the images, and keep your screen resolution at it’s best.
I hope this helps…

I’ve noticed that under Gnome/Ubuntu, the default hinting setting makes fonts look a lot worse than they have to.
To change this, go to System>Preferences>Appearance… select the Fonts tab and click “Details…” set the Hinting option to “Slight”.
This improves TrueType font rendering quite a bit. You may also want to check the dpi setting, however I leave this alone as I’m a web developer and need to match the mainstream settings across OSes as much as possible.)

I want to add another font (specifically Matura MT Script Capitals) to the directory that Firefox hits. This server is a linux (SUSE) box and this is a new HDD (the old one tanked). So where is that directory?
Thx

Wow. That is the worst solution to a simple problem I have ever seen. No, I’m not going to post another solution. But changing your resolution to fix a font size issue is just retarded. Any LCD screen will look “off” if you use anything other than its native resolution.
Sigh..

hey dave i am a newbie here but using firefox first time was awful due to fonts being displayed badly, it was a simple case opf preferences in fire fox for the web page yet this was not the only problem the input font (for want of a geekword) was tiny so i assumed it was a fedora/linux problem, simply went to system preferences, look and feel. appearance, font tab then adjusted the application font hey presto just like magic.perfect.hope thisd helps all.
fedora 8

Dave I also think you may have missed the point. I set my resolution to the exact same specs on linux as on windows, so that can’t be the issue.
Out of the box, linux turns people off. The fonts on LCD monitors especially are extremely blurry/crooked, with the exact same resolution settings as on Windows.
Programs that use GTK are bad. QT is better but still not clear like Windows.
Until these basic issues in linux are fixed, not many people will take it seriously as a desktop operating system.
The other issue I noticed immediately when using firefox on Linux is that the downloads suck up all the bandwidth. On Windows i can download a huge file and browse the internet at the same time. On linux the download sucks up all the bandwidth and I cannot browse the internet at even turtle pace.
I know these issues can be fixed by going into certain config files and maybe even recompiling the kernel (laughing out loud) but the fact is that out of the box linux is not good for a desktop right now. It’s okay, but it isn’t good. It’s definitely not great.
Don’t get me wrong – I use linux and bsd every day myself on my local servers and public web servers. But I’d like to see these issues for the desktop cleaned up with linux. It doesn’t matter whether we can go into config files and fix these issues – what matters is what works out of the box – because people are lazy, even ambitious programmers who know what they are doing like to have a working, clean, and clear system out of the box.

Another good global font solution is to set your actual ‘Usable’ screen size in your XF86Config or xorg.conf file. Measure your usable screen size in millimeters (Width then Height). Now In the Monitor Section, under the specific Monitor you are using (you can have more than one), add a line that says:
—clip
DisplaySize 360 270
—clip
and replace your actual measurements (remember, in millimeters). Now restart X. You may have to adjust all your fonts again, but now the X server is rendering your fonts based on the actual size of the monitor. Some distros don’t do this well on Install. If you don’t like what it did, you can comment out this line and restart X and you will be back where you started.
Donn

The problem is that the form fonts are too small by default. There are several places you can adjust these.
First, look for the userChrome.css file (usually under ~/.mozilla/firefox/yourprofile/chrome). There is an example file there which you can save as userChrome.css. Add this section:
—clip
* {
font-size: 7pt !important;
font-family: Tahoma !important;
}
—clip
and adjust the font and size as necessary.
Second, in the userContent.css, add the following entry:
—clip
input, textarea, select, button,
input[type=”button”], input[type=”reset”], input[type=”submit”] {
font-size: 8pt !important;
font-family: Verdana !important;
}
—clip
and adjust the font and size to your liking.
Oh, and please, changing your gui to fix fonts in one application is like trading in your car because you ran out of gas.
I Hope this fix helps. And, I cannot take credit for this fix, it is posted on the page http://convexhull.com/mandrake_fonts.html by a very helpful Mandrake user named Noel Llopis. (Thanks to him.)
Donn

Dave had some good information, but I believe he missed the point of the question. I had the same problem with all Mozilla and Netscape browsers. The problem is not in the User changeable fonts but those in the hard-coded areas of the menus and the URL addr box. I solved the problem by using Gnome instead of KDE. KDE does not seem to properly display Mozilla windows. I’m not an expert, but KDE does pretty well with all other windows, but there seems to be a problem or at least a font shrinkage with Mozilla browsers. KDE is a little too much like Windows for my taste, so the change to Gnome was a good solution for me towards a plainer and more easily read display anyway.
–Richard

If you choose “other” for the font size, you get a dialog with a horizontal line. Meaure the line and enter the length in decimal notation, so if (for example) the line is 1 9/16 inches, you would enter 1.5625 and select inches, then click OK. Your choices are inches or centimeter.
To the right of display resolution in the Fonts and Colors dialog there is an option to set the minimum font size.

I personally cheat…err….I mean, I install the Microsoft core web fonts (Verdana/Georgia) on Linux, and set the default proportional font to Verdana (even serif). The Times/Serif version that comes with Fedora isn’t very easy on my eyes, and I prefer sans-serif font for the screen anyway.
Everything you need for installing Microsoft fonts on a Linux box is here:http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Dave, Why is it that, “out of the box”, the Firefox browser looks great (font wise) when run on a Windows OS but looks terrible (almost too small and unreadable) on any Linux OS I have tried it on. It is probably the number one killer reason for me no…

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